2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete research paper explores the transition between high school educational contexts to higher education through the first-year engineering students' eyes, quantifying their beliefs related to how much ownership and responsibility they have with regards to their own learning.

The transitions that take place in a college student’s first semester at a university are far from insignificant. Students are often transitioning to a new lifestyle with responsibilities, opportunities, and freedoms that they likely haven’t experienced before. Alongside these life transitions also comes the jarring transition to the new educational context. Higher education is less guided and structured compared to high school education settings, while also moving ahead in content at a faster pace than most high school level courses as well. Many students, particularly in STEM fields given their often-pervasive identities as smart, high-achieving students, struggle with this transition between learning environments. Students will often find themselves using the learning tools and strategies that served them best in high school only to find that those tools and strategies are ineffective in this context. But why is this?

This dramatic shift in educational environment and context calls for students to take more responsibility for their own learning – likely more than they’ve ever taken before in their previous learning contexts. Many students are not aware that this shift in responsibility is the primary component that distinguishes higher education from high school. Even if students do realize that majority of the responsibility for their learning has now shifted to them, many are often not equipped with the necessary self-regulated learning mindset, habits, or behaviors because they have not been taught or had to practice fully regulating their own learning and development because in their previous educational environment, it wasn’t necessary.

Educational researchers in many contexts have observed first-year college students being resistant to adjusting their study habits and learning techniques to be more grounded in self-regulated learning and evidence-based practices. This often results in early college assessment performances being below most students’ typical standards for success that harms students’ sense of belonging in a major, motivation, self-efficacy, etc. We posit that if students were to have a clearer understanding of the dramatic shift in their own responsibility for their learning between a high school and college context, they would be more receptive to adopting evidence-based study strategies and learning techniques sooner after starting their first year rather than waiting until after a disappointing academic outcome in which they feel like they need to “catch up”. This complete research paper reports on a study done to gather data from students to visualize their beliefs about the balance of responsibility for their learning in both high school and college. Surveys were administered to ~350 first-year engineering students enrolled in a 1-semester first-year engineering course at a large, land-grant university. This survey asked each student to distribute 100% responsibility for student learning between 11th and 12th grade high school teachers and students, and then the survey asked the same question for college professors. These results were then analyzed using descriptive statistics and data visualizations to demonstrate students’ perceptions on the balance of responsibility for student learning between students and their educators in these two educational contexts, as well as show the variation in the size of students’ perceived shift in responsibility. Students nearly unanimously agreed that college students should be more responsible for their own learning compared to high school students, but how much responsibility students have compared to the instructors at both levels varied widely from student to student.

As many universities grapple with how to best serve their incoming students and meet them where they are, these results are a roadmap of how to best serve students in their transition to college learning environments. Students acknowledge that they have more ownership and responsibility for their learning, but don’t functionally know what that means or looks like beyond the strategies they employed in high school to be academically successful. We hope that using this framework and these data visualizations to demonstrate and explain the college transition as the largest shift into self-ownership and responsibility of students’ learning thus far will help them understand why their old study strategies will likely no longer be effective in college. We also hope this framing of the transition motivates and inspires students to adopt responsible and evidence-based learning techniques and study strategies early in the semester to prevent unnecessarily poor performance on assessments due to not being well prepared.